Lollipop Has Lot of Issues Now, This is Major One

Every year Google releases a new Android system and every year we see early adopters irritated by software bugs which get addressed in consequent updates. You can very well replace Google and Android with Apple and iOS in the previous sentence and it will still remain true.

Google addressed numerous bug fixes in Android 5.0.1 Update, which has already rolled out for all Nexus devices. We also saw Nexus 7 2012 get updated to Android 5.0.2 directly. Now, it looks like Google will soon release Android 5.0.3 update to address the nastiest bug so far, the Memory Leak bug.

This bug has managed to anger a lot of early adopters. It makes Android system eat up more than 1 GB of RAM and forces other apps to release memory, which in turn affects multi tasking.

All frequently used apps are cached on the RAM memory, from where they can be easily and swiftly retrieved (as compared to Nand flash internal stroage) for efficient multi tasking, in case of critically low RAM, Android removes less frequently used apps on the memory.

With the memory leak bug, Android Lollipop itself uses a large chunk of memory and doesn’t release it. It then assumes other apps as culprit and force closes even running apps and in some cases forces constant reloading of Home Screen. This is really annoying and can render your device temporarily unusable.

Google has acknowledged the issue and rectified it in the Lollipop source code. The fix should be passed on to all Android 5.0.1 users in the next OTA update. Till then, several users claim that a simple reboot can solve several issues and keep your device running for about next 7 days.

Interestingly this issue has been plaguing some users since the first release of developer preview. The issue became the 34^th highest bug of all times (most above it are very old bugs, some dating back to 2010). Till now, it was the most starred unresolved issue in Android Issue Tracker. Perhaps other manufacturers will take advantage of the modified source code before bushing out Lollipop update on their respective devices.